Human Rights In China demands Google rethink

'Not too late' to back out of censored search

By Sumner Lemon | 06 February 06

HRIC (Human Rights In China), a non-profit organisation, has called on Google to rethink its decision to offer a censored version of its search engine in China, telling the company it is "not too late for corporate leadership".

HRIC compared Google's recent launch of the Google.cn search engine to actions by Yahoo and Microsoft, in which Yahoo handed over information that led to the jailing of a Chinese journalist and Microsoft censored another Chinese journalist's blog. Both incidents were widely criticised by human-rights groups and proponents of free speech.

"Rather than exercising corporate leadership, these companies and others have instead engaged in a 'race to the bottom', making concessions that curtail freedom of expression and access to information in China," HRIC said in a statement on its website, which does not appear when searched for using Google.cn.

To illustrate how Google has censored information using the Google.cn search engine, HRIC conducted a comparison of four Google sites: Google.com in English, Google.com in Chinese, Google.cn, and Google.com.tw, the company's Taiwanese website. The group conducted searches on all four sites for a range of phrases in Chinese and English.

HRIC's comparison found that many websites were not found using Google.cn to search for Chinese phrases such as "human rights in China" and "death penalty", as well as the author and title of a recently published book on former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. That book, Zhou Enlai's Later Years by Gao Wenqian, is banned in China.

A more diverse range of websites were found when searching for these titles using the other three Google sites, HRIC said.